What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank - Part 4 Summary & Analysis

Nathan Englander

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Summary

After Mark finishes his anecdote about Jebediah and religious-policing, Deb brings up a recent scandal: Mormons had been converting Jews who died in the Holocaust to Mormonism “against their will” (21). This pivots the conversation into the topic of the Holocaust once again, which Mark seems to treat with some contempt. Though Lauren urges everyone to move away from the subject, Mark brings up the narrator and Deb’s son, saying that Trev does not “seem Jewish” to him (21). Deb responds with anger, but the focus is on the narrator, since he begins to laugh.

The narrator explains his reaction by pointing out that Mark, as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, must have high standards for “seeming Jewish,” but Mark rebuts this notion: he does not care about “the outfit” as much as “building life in a vacuum” (22). He does not believe that an obsession with the...